And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

We have created a world we don’t like, don’t understand and don’t trust, and we are too frightened to try to change it.

I believe America has gone a long way down the wrong road. If we ever needed God’s help, it is now.

People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.

I love the unabashed over-buttered, over-creamed, deep-fried, gooey, over-sugared excessiveness of Amish food,

In business you must give something back.

Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called "freedom."

He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of a heavy rain.

When I push, the top part of the leg goes ahead of the bottom part, and you can hear a big plonk when it comes back. My caddie said 'What the hell was that?!

Five years off my life... I wondered with a wry smile, would people be immortal if they didn't have kids?